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This article examines two decades of strengthening, expansion, and diffusion of gender quota laws in Latin America. The analysis departs from studies of quotas' adoption, numerical effectiveness, or policy impacts, instead focusing on states' use of coercive power to integrate women into public and private institutions. Viewing these policies in light of feminist theories of the poststructuralist state reveals how state institutions act to restructure government and promote gender equality. In building this argument, the article presents an up-to-date empirical survey and conceptual understanding of quota evolution in Latin America, including recent developments in countries such as Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Uruguay.

As gender quotas change the formal rules governing candidate selection, party leaders use informal practices in order to preserve the choicest candidacies for men. This article uses a critical case to highlight how the opposite also occurs. In Mexico, female elites built informal, cross-partisan networks that, in collaboration with state regulators, successfully eliminated political parties’ practices of allocating women the least-viable candidacies. Traditional party elites rely on informal tactics to secure the status quo, but female party members devise their own strategies to force changes to candidate selection, signalling that informality cannot be theorized as wholly negative for women.

Elsa Chaney once argued that Latin American women turned to motherhood to justify their political participation. Now that Latin American women have gained unprecedented access to national-level office, we ask whether these cultural narratives of maternalism still condition female politicians’ access to political power. Using public opinion data, media analysis, and elite interviews, we conceptualise four strategic frames deployed by elite women to justify their national-level political careers: the traditional supermadre, the technocratic caretaker, the macho minimiser, and the difference denier. We argue that while today's female politicians have developed diverse responses to maternalism, their access to public office remains profoundly shaped by structural constraints and cultural narratives that privilege traditional feminine ideals of caretaking.

The diffusion of gender quotas reflects the legitimation of the normative principle of women's equality in public life. Legislative gender quotas, whether adopted through top-down elite decision making or through bottom-up feminist activism, are frequently justified via appeals to norms of inclusion and fairness. These democratic ideals of women's full representation and participation have indeed gained traction: Over the past two decades, quotas have extended beyond legislatures to public institutions, such as cabinets and executive agencies, and to state advisory councils, subnational governments, labor union directorates, and corporate boards. Such diffusion signals a profound gendering of public space and leadership, a transformation initiated by states assuming active roles as the guarantors—rather than mere promoters—of equality.

This article integrates the comparative literature on gender quotas with the existing body of research on women's substantive representation. Quota laws, which bring greater numbers of women into parliaments, are frequently assumed to improve women's substantive representation. We use the Argentine case, where a law mandating a 30% gender quota was adopted in 1991, to show that quotas can affect substantive representation in contradictory and unintended ways. To do so, we disaggregate women's substantive representation into two distinct concepts: substantive representation as process, where women change the legislative agenda, and substantive representation as outcome, where female legislators succeed in passing women's rights laws in the Argentine Congress. We argue that quota laws complicate both aspects of substantive representation. Quotas generate mandates for female legislators to represent women's interests, while also reinforcing negative stereotypes about women's capacities as politicians. Our case combines data from bill introduction and legislative success from 1989 to 2007 with data from 54 interviews conducted in 2005 and 2006. We use this evidence to demonstrate that representation depends on the institutional environment, which is itself shaped by quotas. Institutions and norms simultaneously facilitate and obstruct women's substantive representation.

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